Previews

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

Spiffy:

Combat seems to have come a long way.

Iffy:

No word on whether the 360 and PC versions will interface.

More so than any previous MMO I've ever seen, the character creation interface in Age of Conan sets an amazing tone for the game's brutal world. It's been described before: characters start out as chattel in a slave galley, and it is within the harrowing decks of this ship that you get to define your avatar's looks. By tweaking all the sliders, you can make your character look as feral and brutish as you want, adjusting the precise degree of slant on his broken nose, the depth of the dip of his brow, the contours of his arse. Yes, "arse." If you don't believe me, you can go into the character creation interface and see for yourself. When it comes to impropriety and barbarism, however, these little affectations are just the tip of the iceberg for Age of Conan. It definitely looks like Funcom is going all out for this one.

Funcom's Gaute Godager and Jorgen Theraldson were in town recently to demo the game, and it's come a long way since E3 in terms of polish. By far, my biggest concern since seeing at the show was that the combat lacked heft and impact. Significant strides have been made in this area: when your hits connect, they are accompanied by suitably harsh clangs, and liberal blood splattering. Godager assured us that he was well aware of the need to imbue combat with this sort of feedback, and that he had assembled a "strike team" of developers to amplify these sorts of effects. Next time we see the game, he said, we should not be surprised to witness much in the way of dismemberment and decapitation. If it's good enough for Crom, then that's good enough for me.

Though not a whole lot of new stuff was shown in this week's demo, one cool aspect of the game's PvP system did emerge: the "drunken brawling" system. When your character enters a tavern in one of the game's "civilized" areas, you will have the opportunity, of course, to partake of various draughts. As inebriated Cimmerians (or Aquilonians or Stygians) are wont to do, you will engage in some fisticuffs. Out of this glorious social custom, Funcom has built an entire PvP subsystem. It works like this: certain drinks will increase certain attributes specific to drunken brawling -- how well you sway, or how blissed-out you feel, for instance. Depending on what type of liquor you're tanked on (and thus, what attribute you've emphasized on this particular occasion), you'll do better against enemies who are under another sort of influence, sort of like paper, rock, scissors. Only with loincloths and bare fists. It's still unclear how this will factor into the game's PvP system as a whole -- will there be rewards? ranks? -- but even if it's just something to do to pass the time, it should be fairly entertaining.

Funcom is also hoping to revitalize the age-old MMO activity of "camp grinding." MMO players raised on "modern" games may not be familiar with this pursuit, which involves traveling (usually in a party) to a "camp" where certain types of monsters spawn, in order to kill them for experience points. These usually aren't literal camp sites; just spots in the persistent world where monsters of the same type roam. In Age of Conan, however, the camps you'll visit will most likely be discrete spaces where bandit-types are holed up.

Godager had a lot to say about what Funcom hopes to achieve with these sorts of sites, in order to make them more interesting as a whole, as well as accessible to various kinds of play styles (including solo play). Primarily, these camps will be populated with various "points of interest" that will trigger certain events in the area when interacted with. You can, for instance, knock over a weapon rack in order to direct enemies to the site of the disturbance. Another example he cited were altars that one could desecrate, so as to spawn special enemies unique to a given site. With these sorts of systems in place, the designers hope to create scalable, interactive play areas that will make the persistent world much more interesting to inhabit.

Though this week's demo came hot on the heels of the game's official announcement for Xbox 360, Godager and Theraldson couldn't divulge much about how much of a difference, if any, there will be between the PC and console versions. Everything is still up in the air, it seems: both versions might share servers, or they may be segregated; there may be 360-exclusive content, or not; accounts might or might not be sharable between the two. My guess is that they'll take advantage of Microsoft's "Live Anywhere" ethos and allow some heavy interaction between the two, but you never know. The game has obviously been designed for play with control pad, so as far as interface limitations go, well, there probably won't be many.

Age of Conan looks better and better each time we see it. We'll have more on it as soon as we can. Hopefully, Crom will see to it that we are allowed into the earliest testing phase possible.